9 Infographics That’ll Help You Craft the Perfect Thanksgiving Feast

WIRED partnered with Food Network and crunched 49,733 recipes and 906,539 comments from their massive website. The result is a fascinating overview of how Americans cook.

3. Designing Your Thanksgiving Menu

Our idea for this entire package came from a simple problem: How do you find the best recipe for whatever you’re trying to make? Sure, you can go by rating. But that’s only part of the picture. What about how hard a dish is to prepare? You might find two Bolognese recipes with similar ratings, but you’re more apt to make the one that takes just a couple hours of cooking time.

So, armed with foodnetwork.com’s 49,733 recipes and 906,539 ratings, we solved the problem–with a specific eye towards Thanksgiving. It’s a tough period for almost all of us: We’re cooking the most we’ll cook all year, but at the same time, we don’t cook any of those dishes regularly enough to know exactly what works. (How many times a year do you make cranberry dressing or roast a turkey?)

Above is a series of charts that cut through the mass of foodnetwork.com’s thousands of Thanksgiving recipes. We found just the highest rated. We charted the prep time on the x-axis and number of ingredients on the y-axis. Our working hypothesis for organizing the data like this was simple: Why make something complicated when you can get good results in less time, with less shopping? Here’s an interactive version, for your viewing delight:

Easy Dishes for the Main Event

Thanksgiving dishes, arranged by prep time vs number of ingredients.

You can click out to any of the recipes you see listed. But the chart is telling you simply how much you have to invest in a dish, and how other dishes compare. And, if you’re gung-ho about maximizing your time, we’ve also provided a handy chart above showing exactly how to phase each of foodnetwork.com’s top dishes, so that you can get all of your cooking done in time for football.